Reds and feds: what the FBI's war on the Maoist fringe tells us about the surveillance state.

• Author: Kinney, Jay
• Position: Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists - Book review

Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists, by Aaron J. Leonard and Conor A. Gallagher, Zero Books, 337 pages, $29.95

BY THE TAIL END of the 1960s, Sovietstyle socialism held little attraction for the American left, except to those within the shrinking orbit of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). It clearly was a stagnant system. But Chinese socialism seemed like it might be something else. For those who still believed in the communist ideal, Maoism was a life raft to cling to.

The surveillance state clung to it too. From the early'60s onward, the FBI infiltrated, disrupted, and monitored America's Maoist movement, which it considered a tool of the Chinese regime. As early as 1962, an enterprising FBI agent created a self-styled Ad Hoc Committee for Scientific Socialism as a supposedly Maoist rump faction within the CPUSA.

The FBI also paid attention to the Progressive Labor Party, a pro-Mao group whose machinations played a big role in the breakup of Students for a Democratic Society. And in the 1970s, as Maoist grouplets proliferated, the bureau kept both an eye on and a hand in the proceedings.

With Heavy Radicals, historians Aaron Leonard and Conor Gallagher illuminate the surveillance state's role in shaping both the left itself and the government's response to it. Their case study is the Maoist group known first as the Revolutionary Union (R.U.), which evolved into the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) over the course of the'70s and soon thereafter devolved into a personality cult centered around its chairman, Bob Avakian.

The Revolutionary Union was founded in 1968 by a set of strong personalities, including Avakian, the Stanford historian H. Bruce Franklin, the longtime activist Leibel Bergman, and Steve Hamilton, one of the Oakland Seven--a group of East Bay radicals arrested for attempting to inspired by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and in many ways were a throwback to the Stalinism of the 1930s. (Franklin even edited an anthology tided The Essential Stalin, with an introduction that attempted to rehabilitate the dictator's reputation.)

R.U. may have been mostly unknown to the country at large, but it was of great interest to the FBI, which was worried that the group's back-to-basics appeal might attract the scattered but growing ranks of American Maoists. FBI documents, obtained by Leonard and Gallagher under the Freedom of Information Act, indicate that the government successfully planted informers and...